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Originally posted by drew
The control room is the least of my worries. I'm actually pretty happy with it and would probably replicate it in the new studio. I have learned how much AC is needed since it shares the house system and it gets very hot. My recording room is my main problem. It's 20x24 which is cool but it's ceiling is only 6'10"ugh!!! Then there is the issues Michael spoke of. Parking, noise (which I couldn't do much about without losing more ceiling height) etc....
How did you do the walls? Anything special with the AC? Any other caveats?
drew |
My recording room is 12 X 22 with 10' ceilings. It is ok for most overdubs and for drum tracking with the band in the control room, but I sure would like some more space. The walls and ceiling are plain drywall and the floor is concrete. The room was built around an old Ludwig snare and a Marshall stack (the only instruments we had available when we built it). We just left it in a certain state when we thought it sounded good. The room is 2" wider on one side, so the walls are not parallel and there is no flutter echo. It has a fairly long smooth decay and is extremely loud. I use TubeTraps and removable Auralex/Sonex to control reflections. The recording room itself is a box inside a room and is connected to the control room only via the (existing) concrete floor. The walls rest on some kind of rubber insulation material. The wall to the control room has a 7' x 4' window and is five layers thick: two layers of drywall on a 2x4 wood frame with insulation in between on the recording room side - 2" of air - another wood frame with two layers of drywall on the outside (controlroom side) and insulation on the inside. The insulation is two layers thick as well, one of which is the pink fluffy stuff (forgot the name) and the other is 8 pounds per inch compressed insulation. We are not really acousticians (?) so it was more of an educated guess, but it worked out fine.
The A/C is one of the things I would do different next time. The problem is that I have only one unit serving the control room, the studio and the lounge/kitchen. Now, because of all the tube gear
the controlrom gets fairly hot. By the time I get that down to about 72, you can hang meat in the lounge. We did run each A/C hose from each outlet all the way to the unit, so the sound has to go through the A/C unit. That keeps sound from going through the A/C pipes from the studio into the control room. The pipes run in an attic sort of thing which is filled up with insulation that was blown in, I think it is made out of old newspaper and was a big mess do deal with.
The control room shape is not ideal (20 x 22 x 9.5) and I had to experiment a lot until I got the ADAMs, now I'm very happy with the way it sounds.
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Then there is the issues Michael spoke of. Parking, noise
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and in the case of the studio being in the house it's interuptions of "honey do" stuff and getting sidetrapped by things outside of the studio work (like bills
.)
We shot the whole process of building WireWorld on video. When I'm done with the current project, I could try to put a short form video toghether, if you're interested. Like I said, it's by NO means a scientific approach to building studios but it might trigger some ideas.